ARTICLES ABOUT NORTHERN CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION BY DATE - PAGE 2

A state legislator Wednesday called for a legislative hearing to investigate why a prison captain was denied a request to shackle a death row inmate Daniel Webb, before Webb allegedly attacked him while being moved to a cell Monday at Northern Correctional Institution in Somers. State Rep. Karen Jarmoc, D-Enfield, said that the legislative judiciary committee's co-chairman, Rep. Michael P. Lawlor, D-East Haven, has agreed next week to discuss holding such a hearing. Jarmoc also said a prison psychologist had told correction officials in an email about his concern regarding an "aggressive focus on the captain" exhibited by Webb, 47, who allegedly assaulted the captain Monday and four others who subdued him. "This is disturbing and completely unacceptable," Jarmoc said in a press release.

A death-row inmate attacked a guard Monday inside Connecticut's highest-security prison, correction officials said. The Northern Correctional Institution was locked down after the inmate, identified by a state lawmaker as Daniel Webb, punched a captain in the head just before 10:30 a.m., said Brian Garnett, a department spokesman. Garnett refused to identify the inmate, but state Rep. Karen Jarmoc, D-Enfield, who served as chairwoman of a task force on safety issues in the prisons, said she was notified that it was Webb, 47, who is awaiting execution for the 1989 murder of bank executive Diane Gellenbeck in Hartford.

A union official raised concerns about safety at a youth detention center Wednesday after two separate inmate attacks that injured four correction officers. Three guards were taken to a hospital — two by ambulance — after the first attack at Manson Youth Institution Tuesday evening, prison and union officials said. State police, who arrested the inmates, said they are members of a street gang. Police identified the inmates as Jordan Anderson and Reginald Lemount, both 18 and from Middletown.

Department of Correction staff followed policy and procedure when dealing with an inmate suicide at Northern Correctional Institution in July, an internal investigation has determined. Correction officers found 25-year-old James Moore hanging in his cell at 7:46 p.m. on July 22. He had tied a towel around his neck and hung himself from the top rung of the ladder to his bunk, according to the investigation report. The officers opened the cell for medical staff, who performed CPR until an ambulance arrived.

The state's maximum security prison will remain on lockdown through the weekend as correction officials and state police try to unravel why three separate attacks on prison guards took place on Friday, including one that left a guard unconscious. Brian Garnett, a spokesman for the Department of Correction, said Saturday that the lockdown at Northern Correctional Institution was ordered to "stabilize the situation." A lockdown means inmates are confined to their cells and visitations are canceled.

State police and correction officials are investigating how a 30-year-old inmate broke a cell window that opened to the outside at the state's super-maximum-security prison Thursday. The window was only 4 inches wide, so there was no potential for the inmate to get through the opening in the Northern Correctional Institution cell. The incident has not been classified as an attempted escape. That determination will be made at the conclusion of the investigation, Stacy Smith, a spokesman for the state Department of Correction, said Friday.

After deliberating about five hours Friday, a federal jury in Bridgeport found that a captain at Northern Correctional Institution used excessive force against an inmate who had been placed in four-point restraints and left there for 22 hours. The eight-member jury in the civil rights lawsuit found that Capt. Sebastian Mangiafico punched 38-year-old Duane Ziemba after the inmate was forcibly removed from his cell nearly eight years ago. The jury awarded $250,000 in compensatory and punitive damages to Ziemba, according to his lawyer Jim Nugent.